@audrey-dowling Oh, yes - if you throw in priting everything becomes crazily complex. Most professional printers (and I assume publishers work with professional printers) will make all adjustments needed to get the wished print result. I have been involved in offset printing for the agency: looking over the shoulder of a pro offset printer is like looking at an audio technician calibrating audiotracks - they have dials for every ink and can dial it to the right amount on every single section of a page. For illustration work, I have been asked to delivere CYMK files for printing (which I hate!), and never heard complaints. For digital printing, the printer and the paper will have a much bigger influence than any monitor difference. Ask the print services to send you their paper samples - all of them will oblige.I print on Hanemuhle paper, even though it is very expensive, because it gives wonderful results. With the print-provider I use (WhiteWall) on Hanemuhle photorag, the result is very close to my second monitor (more saturated). Same with the Canon Pixma, which I have tried in the office - also close to the second monitor. The Pixma comes with a calibration software that prints tiny probes of your sample with different settings, so you can choose the ones that work best.
The reduced saturation of the Cintiq is described in forums. Some people say it can be solved with the Spyder, but according to @evilrobot this may not be true.
CPU preview is used by some softwares that deliver a „preview“ on the monitor, not the real thing. Illustrator, InDesign and AfterEffects all work like that. The CPU preview makes the software perform faster - but on the Cintiq it´s so bad as to be unusable (so I turn it off - never suffered performance problems anyhow...)

@smceccarelli Thank you. You're right..I'm not dead yet! :-) Ha! I am going to finish my book and I'm going to try and enjoy what I do whether it is perfect or not. I will look for that book. Wow! So wonderful. I appeciate you and your encoragement and reminders. If I live to be 100 I still have 40 years! Maybe I have only 1 year but.....I might as well make the most of whatever time I have. I am a creative person and I need to be doing something creative...just need to switch things up a bit now and then and have fun in between the hard stuff, right? :-)

I can explain more here by why I think this isn't much of a ripoff. The big thing in my book is context. In terms of context, you have a monster under the bed. The bed is made for sleeping at night. People snore at night. So it's not a big stretch to think that the idea of the monster snoring loudly would be a logical choice by anyone drawing a story about a monster under/in a bed at night.

With a real infringement case, it would need to be something that ISN'T linked by logical conclusion or context. For instance, If the monster took the kid to Las Vegas to gamble. That (albeit insane) idea is very specific and non linear in terms of what people think of with monsters under the bed story. So if two artists had a monster taking a kid to vegas, then we have a real case of plagiarism or influence.

So the idea of a logical (or generic) conclusion vs. a specific creative choice or detail makes a big difference. Does that make sense?

To add to this, the character design can be broken down in the same way. Things that are inherent in monster design: Horns, claws, fur, fangs, etc. Colors vary, but are typically very standard yellow or blue, or green, etc. So we have two pretty predictable monster designs here. But they actually aren't that similar. If we were to break down specifics (as applied to infringement) it would go something like this:

Are items similar?
Color: Yes (generic)
Eyes: no
nose: no
headshape: no
fangs: sort of
fur: no
mouth: yes
drawing style: no

So you can see there are more "no" answers here than yes answers. Now, if we are talking unexpected and specific, you would have a different story. For example, If the character was blue with polka dots on the arms and had red stripes on the legs while wearing a magician hat and holding an umbrella, that would be much more protected. It would be easier to make the case of infringement. So this is a way to see how close you are to someone else's work.

The other thing about thinking in this way is it stops you from worrying about other people writing or drawing the same thing as you. For example, I'm writing a story about the moon. THere are a bunch of children's books about the moon. So I need to make sure my solutions are specific and don't overlap in meaningful ways from what's out there. But the typical or generic information about the moon is available to me since that stuff is not specific to an individual story.

If you use this tutorial for adjusting levels. (do it on each scan before you combine them in the method already listed) it will get you pretty darn close to your original. I have a value chart I scan in with my paintings and use the black and white swatches to adjust levels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VeDhq8Y4cU

If I get out of what I need from it I will pay the sub no problem. It's rather small, one trip to the coffee shop worth. I was paying Adobe 50 a month and not using anything but PS occasionally and I will use this a ton more. I had a sub to astropad studio for when I fought the lag and worked in CSP from the ipad. I cancelled it and this is the same price so I am actually getting a six month break hehe.

I am glad I could present some points to help you think more about the career!

I don't think the company will decide whether it is a entry level job or advanced level. They will offer that price and it's up to the artist to take it or not. Usually a seasoned artist with 5 or 10 years of experience will be able to say no to such offers (or maybe not even waste time looking for them).

It ends up on the hands of artists starting their careers. We know some starting artists may be quite good in terms of artistic skills and they may think this is a great opportunity. Or maybe, some of these starting artists are just desperately needing money and they accept the offer.

As for the quality of the materials for analog art, I agree that better quality materials have an effect on the quality of the creation, but I mean that a good artist can use a 2 dollars sketchbook and a 10 dollars watercolour set and make a piece that is much better compared to a bad artist that invested on high quality materials. So, I believe the beginner artist should invest on becoming a good artist. The seasoned good professional artist is making money to be able to afford good quality material in case the work he is being paid for requires higher quality material (or maybe he just want to have fun with new materials :P )

P.s.: just a detail... I used the term "analog art" instead of "traditional art" because I think the term traditional is very misused. I think even in digital art, there are techniques and processes that are not used anymore and are therefore "traditional". For example, nowadays in 3D computer graphics its very common to create characters by doing digital sculpting (high polygonal sculpting) while in the past it was done by basic geometry modeling (low polygonal modeling). So, the low-poly modeling can be considered a traditional way to do 3D digital art. Or even in non digital art, someone can be using a new technique that was never used before - I think using high tech machines to cut metal to make a sculpture is a very "non-traditional" way to do sculpture, which is not digital at all.

@evilrobot I do agree with Stephen Silver on this actually. $500 is a piddling amount for the amount of work that would be needed to do and you lose the rights to anything you submit... hmmmm. Shame because like I say, I do like the Dark Crystal, but this practice is taking advantage of artists and in particular fans of the franchise and I wouldn't enter this personally.
It makes me feel crappy for liking Dark Crystal to be honest. I'm sort of wondering what Brian Froud thinks of this dodgy practice given that he will be a judge...